DYNAMIC USER INTERFACES FOR SEMI-STRUCTURED CONVERSATIONS

James E. Hanson, Prabir Nandi, Santhosh Kumaran, Paul Foreman

2005

Abstract

The growing complexity of application-to-application interactions has motivated the development of an architectural model with first-class support for multi-step, stateful message exchanges—i.e., conversations—and a declarative means of specifying conversational protocols. In this paper, we extend this architectural model to encompass UI-enabled devices, thereby enabling it to cover human-to-application conversations as well. This permits either participant to be human-driven, automated, or anywhere in between, without affecting the nature of the interaction or of the other participant. The UI-enabled conversational model also reduces the difficulty of developing conversational applications, providing significant benefits both for UI and for application developers. We describe the architecture of a UI-enabled conversational system that supports a variety of user devices, and includes a means by which UI markup may be automatically generated from the conversational protocols used. We go through a sample application currently implemented using a commercially available application server, and further describe a graphical tool for editing and testing conversational protocols, that significantly eases the protocol development process.

References

  1. Hanson, J., Nandi, P., and Levine, D., 2002. Conversationenabled Web Services for Agents and E-business, in Proc. 3rd Intl. Conference on Internet Computing (IC02), CSREA Press, pp.791-796.
  2. Milner, R, 1999. Communicating and Mobile Systems: the pi-calculus, Cambridge Press, Cambridge, UK.
  3. Greaves, M., Bradshaw, J. M., (eds.), 1999. Proc. Autonomous Agents 7899 Workshop on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies.
  4. cpXML, 2002. Conversation Policy XML, www.research.ibm.com/convsupport/papers/cpXMLv1.htm
  5. W3C World Wide Web Consortium, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, 2001. www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
  6. Hanson, J., and Z. Milosevic, Z., 2003. Conversationoriented Protocols for Contract Negotiations, in Proc. 7th IEEE Intl.Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC-2003), IEEE Press.
  7. CS-WS, 2002. Conversation Support for Web services, www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/cs-ws
  8. WebSphere Application Server homepage, IBM Corporation, 2004. www.ibm.com/software/webservers/appserv/was
  9. The W3C Voice Browser Workshop www.w3.org/Voice/1998/Workshop/papers.html
  10. Apache.org, 2004. Jakarta Struts Framework, jakarta.apache.org/struts/
  11. Szekely, P., 1996. Retrospective and Challenges for Model-Based Interface Development, www.idi.ntnu.no/emner/tdt12/szekely-retrospectiveCADUI96.pdf
  12. Paterno, F. and Santoro, C., 2002. One Model, Many Interfaces, giove.cnuce.cnr.it/teresa/pdf/PaternoCADUI2002.pdf
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

E. Hanson J., Nandi P., Kumaran S. and Foreman P. (2005). DYNAMIC USER INTERFACES FOR SEMI-STRUCTURED CONVERSATIONS . In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS, ISBN 972-8865-19-8, pages 48-58. DOI: 10.5220/0002519100480058


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis05,
author={James E. Hanson and Prabir Nandi and Santhosh Kumaran and Paul Foreman},
title={DYNAMIC USER INTERFACES FOR SEMI-STRUCTURED CONVERSATIONS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,},
year={2005},
pages={48-58},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002519100480058},
isbn={972-8865-19-8},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,
TI - DYNAMIC USER INTERFACES FOR SEMI-STRUCTURED CONVERSATIONS
SN - 972-8865-19-8
AU - E. Hanson J.
AU - Nandi P.
AU - Kumaran S.
AU - Foreman P.
PY - 2005
SP - 48
EP - 58
DO - 10.5220/0002519100480058